I eyed the plate before me. “This is what any decent butcher removes from the . . . what I’ll generously assume was a cow . . . before sending it to the kitchens.”

Snorri started tucking in. “And what you leave will make a meal for someone who’s really hungry. Eat up, Jal.”

Jal again! I would have to sort that out with him sometime soon.

Snorri cleared his plate in about the same time it took me to decide which bit of mine looked least dangerous. He took a stale hunk of bread from his pocket and started scraping up the gravy. “That fellow with the knife looks like he wants to stick it into you, Jal.”

“What can you expect from this kind of establishment?” I tried for a manly growl. “You get what you pay for, and soon we won’t be able to pay for even this.”

Snorri shrugged. “Your choice. If you want luxury, sell your locket.”

I restrained myself from laughing at the barbarian’s ignorance—all the more puzzling, as you would think a man accustomed to the business of loot and pillage would have a better eye when it came to appraising which valuables to carry off. “What is it with you and my locket?”

“You’re a brave man, Jal,” Snorri said, apropos of nothing. He poked the last of the bread between his lips and started chewing, cheeks bulging.

I frowned, trying to figure out why he’d said that—was it some kind of threat? I also tried to figure out what the thing dangling from the end of my knife was. I put it in my mouth. Best not to know.

Finally Snorri managed to swallow down his huge mouthful and explained. “You let Maeres Allus break your finger rather than pay your debts. And yet you could have paid the man off at any time with that trinket of yours. You chose not to. You chose to keep and honour the memory of your mother over your own safety. That’s loyalty to family. That’s honour.”

“That’s nonsense!” Anger got the better of me. It had been a rotten day. A rotten week. The worst ever. I whipped the locket from its hiding place in a small pocket under my arm. Better judgment warned me against it. Worse judgment warned me too, but Snorri had worn both away. Snorri and the rain. “This,” I said, “is a simple piece of silver and I’ve never been brave in my—”

Snorri tapped it out of my hand and it went sailing in a bright and glittering arc that set it splashing down in the soup man’s dish, splattering him with a generous helping of brown muck. “If it’s not worth anything and you’re not brave, then you won’t be going over there to get it back.”

To my astonishment I found myself most of the way across the intervening space before Snorri had got past his third word. Soup man rose, bawling out some threat in his gibberish: “murdtet” featured again. His knife looked even more unpleasant up close, and in a desperate attempt to stop him sticking it into me I caught hold of his wrist whilst punching him in the throat as hard as I could. Sadly his chin got in the way, but I knocked him back and as a bonus the wall smacked him round the back of the head.